Let's talk posters: a novel role-playing activity to prepare undergraduate researchers for poster presentations

Abstract

Calls to increase undergraduate involvement in research have led to a significant increase in student participation via course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs). These CUREs provide students an authentic research experience, which often involves dissemination of research by public speaking. For instance, the First-year Research Immersion (FRI) program at Binghamton University is a three-semester CURE sequence that prepares students for scientific research and effective communication of their findings. After one semester of research, students from the FRI program are tasked with presenting their research to hundreds of faculty members, staff, friends, and family at the annual FRI poster session. However, our students, and undergraduates in general, report high anxiety and fear around public speaking such as this. To better prepare our students for public speaking at a research poster session, we developed a workshop that includes a novel role-play activity to mimic a fast-paced poster session or conference in order to address students' fears and increase confidence levels. The role-play activity gives students iterative practice such that they are prepared for the realities of a poster session including variation of poster attendees. During the activity, students switch roles between presenter and audience member. In the role of an audience member, students are given Pokèmon-like role-playing cards that explain the traits and abilities of various types of poster-goers that students might come across (faculty in and out of discipline, staff, family, friends, etc.). Students improvise and enact their card-assigned role as they engage with their classmates who are practicing their poster presentations. To assess student outcomes, students were given three surveys: pre-activity, post-activity, and post-poster presentation. Immediately following the activity, 64% of students reported the highest level of confidence, and following the poster session, 93% of students reported extreme confidence in their poster presentation abilities. These data show that this role-play activity can help address student confidence and better prepare students to communicate their research.

Keywords: confidence; course-based undergraduate research experience (CURE); public speaking; research poster presentation; science communication; undergraduate research.

Fig 1

Students’ self-reported confidence in poster presentation abilities. Data show students’ self-reported confidence in delivering their poster presentation at the public, final poster session at various points in time from left to right: before the activity (n = 218), immediately after the activity (n = 139), after the activity but before the public poster presentation (n = 260), and after the public poster presentation (n = 260). Students were asked to rate their confidence on a 5-point Likert scale (Appendix 5). A significant positive correlation (Kendall’s tau-b) was found between exposure to the activity and confidence (<0.001, 0.396 medium effect size).

Fig 2

Time spent practicing by various methods. To be able to assess whether or not the activity impacted how much students (n = 260) practiced and their method of practicing for the public poster presentation, students were surveyed on (A) the number of hours spent practicing and (B) the ways in which they practiced. Students were able to list more than one way in which they practiced; thus, data show percentage of total students for each category.